Use your WORDS

I haven't posted here in a while, so I thought I should, if only to prove to some naysayers (or just one in particular) that I can maintain two blogs at a time.

Law school has been busy as usual but not all that interesting. The lay person would probably neither understand, nor care about the content of my daily classes.

However, I will leave you with this

General Public Service Announcement

If you are upset at someone and really want to physically hurt her, you might want to refrain lest you become liable for more than you bargained for.

Unwanted, offensive touching is considered a battery (a kind of tort). But if the person you hurt just happens to have a rare bone disorder that makes her bones so brittle that your slap/kick/punch/etc. actually breaks her bones (even if a light tap would've broken them anyway), you foot the bill for ALL her medical woes.

That is the torts principle of: You take the Plaintiff as you find her (thin-skulled, brittle-boned, and all.)

So remember America: When you are pissed off, be safe, be risk-averse, and just use your WORDS.

Oops. I may have spoke too soon.

After Gerald Amirault (see previous post) came to our class and answered our questions, I was convinced that he was innocent.

But I may have spoke (spoken?) too soon.

The next day, to my shock and delight, Larry Hardoon, the prosecutor who prosecuted Gerald's case came to our class and told us his version of the events. He was very convincing and now I'm confused.

Is Gerald guilty? Is he innocent?

Certain things about Larry’s presentation raised doubts in my mind. The first hole that Larry poked was the main foundation upon which I had built Gerald’s innocence on, which was the interviewer’s horrendous techniques while questioning the children. That was a really dispositive fact in my mind. No way could Gerald’s trial have been fair if the evidence of his conviction rested mainly on these horrible interviews.

But Larry pointed out that the interviews were not for disclosure, but only for documentation. The children had all disclosed their alleged assaults prior to the taping of the interviews.

Another detail that made me question Gerald’s innocence was the fact that most parents were extremely reluctant to press charges against the Amiraults and were very hostile to the idea of their kids having been sexually assaulted. A particular story about the little girl who stuck toys into her vagina while bathing and saying that she was “playing school,” also made me question my initial assumptions.

But the most devastating blow to my once stalwart belief that Gerald was innocent, was the way Larry presented a plausible explanation for not only what the Amiraults were doing but also their possible motives behind their alleged sexual assaults. It is very hard for me to believe that a mother and daughter would turn the other way and let their son and brother have his jollies with little kids simply because the mother and daughter were indulgent people.

But it is much easier for me to believe that a mother, daughter, and son would conspire together to make a big profit on illicit pictures taken of the kids, because greed is a motive I can understand. It is a little suspicious that the Amiraults were financially better off than one might expect from people in their line of work. And it is a little suspicious that the kids spoke of pens and knives being stuck in them and a camera-like device in the magic room, which correlated to a certain genre of pornographic pictures in the outside world. It doesn’t help the prosecution’s case that they never found a shred of evidence to support that theory, but there was a suspicious fire that destroyed a lot of film.

Regardless of the evidence, or lack of evidence, the theory is compelling. It supplies a good motive. Added to "opportunity", which came when kids were left with the Amiraults during field trips, my doubts grew to disturbing proportions.

In the end, I decided that I could not say whether Gerald was guilty or innocent.

Without looking at all the evidence (How suspiciously wealthy were the Amiraults? What exactly did the doctors find when they examined the kids? How exactly were the initial disclosures handled? Why were the kids so reluctant to recount their assaults when videotaped? etc.) I simply can not make a determination.

And I think that is a valuable lesson to learn.

I feel silly that I so readily jumped on the unjust-conviction-bandwagon proclaiming Gerald’s innocence the day he came to class. But it bears learning anew that trite but trusty proverb: There’s two sides to every story. And that’s the truth.

This man came to my class today and told us his incredible story of tragedy and injustice

4-5 year old kids at the Fells Acre Day School told police investigators about a bad clown that took them to a "magic room" and stuck magic wands and knives up their anuses and vaginas.

Amirault was wrongly convicted of sexual abuse.
They said that "Tookie", the name they called the assistant director, Gerald Amirault, was the bad clown that did this to them.

Thus Gerald Amirault was arrested and convicted of sexually assaulting those kids in 1986 and was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment.

But he was innocent.

Never was there a shred of corroborating evidence that Amirault had done the heinous acts that he was convicted of. There were no marks or bruises on the kids. There were no alleged pornographic pictures of the kids. And no teachers or parents of the daycare center ever saw suspicious activities or a so called "magic room".

So how did this horrible nightmare happen?

It was a trainwreck of bad police investigation, appalling techniques used in child interviewing, overzealous prosecutors, and self-serving judges. It was the criminal justice system at its worst.

You could say it began with a soggy underwear. One of the kids at the daycare center wet his pants and a teacher asked Gerald to help the kid change since the teacher was busy at the time. Many months later, the kid's family discovers sexual abuse issues related to the kid's cousins and uncles and asked the kid about his experiences at the daycare. The kid mentioned that Gerald took his pants off one day and that unleashed the "hounds" of criminal investigation.

Police came to the daycare center, and immediately started asking the kids and parents about suspicious behavior and sexual assault that might be related to Gerald. Kids were subjected to hours of interrogation full of leading questions and some might even say badgering.

An example of the horrible interviews conducted is as follows:

Interviewer: So, what did this bad clown do to you?

Kid: There's no clown.

Interviewer: Yes there is. What did he do to you?

Kid: There's no clown.

Interviewer: Didn't he touch your butt?

Kid: No.

Interviewer: Yes he did. He touched your butt. You're friend Suzy said he touched her butt too.

Kid: No. She's lying.

You get the idea. This particular interview went on for four hours every day for a nearly a week until the poor kid finally broke down and said, "Yes. There was a clown and he touched my butt. And he stuck a wand up it." To this day, this witness feels like it really did happen to her!

And so Gerald was put in prison. He and his lawyers tried very hard to get his case overturned on appeal somehow, but it never happened despite to mountain of evidence that pointed in Gerald's favor. Finally Gerald was paroled in 2003 after serving 18 years of his sentence. He has yet to be acquitted.

I was amazed to see him in our class today. We had free reign to ask him all about his experiences and how he dealt with the horrible pain and injustice of it all.

He said that he focused on his wife and 3 kids and worked out a lot. The man is ripped. He also kept himself busy getting a BA from Boston University through correspondence and of course worked tirelessly on his own case.

He was a really nice and surprisingly well adjusted man who said he wanted to move on and not dwell on the terrible injustice that happened. Being consumed with bitterness would just steal more of the precious life that was taken from him.